By Chris Woollams

Where do we start? With Peter d'Adamo and his mass-market tome "Eat Right for Your Type", or with William Kelley and his division of his patients into twelve metabolic types?

You thrive on certain foods whilst others cause problems

Either way the principle is the same. Your genetic structure, your blood type and your individual biochemistry; you thrive on certain foods whilst others cause problems. You know that, I know that. But do conventional cancer therapists? Or even indeed the chorus of therapists who try to drive all of us towards a standardised no dairy, all vegetarian diet?

Bill Wolcott is a founder of Healthexcel, a company that specialises in metabolic typing. Bill was a former assistant to William Kelley and claims to have worked with over 60,000 patients, of which about 25,000 were cancer patients.

As we continually say at icon (Integrated Cancer and Oncology News), cancer is as individual as you are. Metabolic typing acknowledges this fact.

In one respect there is no magic formula here. A good integrative doctor in the UK like Etienne Callebout or Patrick Kingsley will go to great lengths to analyse you, your metabolism and the possible causes of your disease. If you do not know the cause, how can you really begin treatment? For if smoking 'caused' your lung cancer and you didn't quit, surely even with the best treatment in the world you would expect the cancer to return.

He simply wanted to be really fit and
healthy

Bill Wolcott belongs to the 'one size doesn't fit all' school of diet therapy. He became interested in Kelley's work but not as someone with a cancer to cure. Wolcott became interested in eating the foods that were best suited to his personal biochemistry. He simply wanted to be really fit and healthy and recognised that some people thrive on high protein diets whilst others thrive on carbohydrate.

Kelley has based his early work on the equilibrium of the autonomic nervous system, which is divided into two halves: the sympathetic side basically speeds you up, while the parasympathetic side shows you down. Just as eating the right foods might positively affect one half, or balance the two, so the perfect diet would help to detoxify the organs. For the nervous system is connected to the body's organs and tissues and balance in the nervous system will allow correct supply of nutrients and the removal of toxins - and vice versa.

Wolcott developed this theory to a higher level and has nine types determining characteristics clustered into three groups - he calls them the 9 Fundamental Homeostatic Controls. (Homeostasis is the word that denotes if all things are equal and we are in a natural environment we will be completely balanced.)

His 9 controls include:

It is interesting to note that control 8 is the basis for D'Adamo's theories, and that control 9 fits in with the whole principle of Ayurveda and the three Dosha's (vata, pitta and kapha).

So how should you plan your ideal cancer busting diet?

So how should you plan your ideal cancer busting diet?

Well if you go with John Boik's view you would take a large number of natural products, just as we did in the wild and kill off all aspects of the cancer process. (John Boik of the MD Anderson Cancer Center has looked at all the foods we would normally have eaten in our natural environments and draw up a list of these that have benefits against aspect of the cancer process.) If you agree that your breast cancer is not the same as the lady's next door, you can go to the Internet, where at www.healthexcel.com you can obtain instructions and a questionnaire to set about determining your metabolic type.

With Kelley and Wolcott's theories 'You are what you eat' now takes second place to the old maxim, 'One man's meat is another man's poison'.

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